Manded's Tank Guide (Endwalker update)

[Manded]

Hello and welcome to my tank guide!

I'm Manded and i've been playing this game on and off for a while now since "A Realm Reborn" and i figured i'd make this guide since it felt like a fun thing to do! I also reckon it might be a fun thing to look back at in a couple years time.

This isn't meant to be a perfect guide or anything but i'll try my best to convey all the important knowledge behind the role!

I'll start off with general tank knowledge and information and finish off with smaller tips and tricks that even I need a good refresher on.

Ok, let's start!

What's a Tank?

This is a TANK

No, not the actual tank, but the person driving it! (or popping out of the hatch at least)

There are various ways to identify a tank, the main way is by looking at their job icon. damage dealers have red icons, healers are green and tanks are blue, so if it's blue it's a tank!

Tank (Paladin)

Not a tank (White Mage)

Tank's naturally have more health and more defensive cooldowns to reduce damage than any other role. Therefore their main job in a party is to make enemies target them(they do this with enmity management) so they can take most of the hits and keep the damage away from other party members. They are also still expected to deal as much damage as they can to clear hard content (as with all other roles).

How do i unlock a tank?

Currently there are 4 Tank jobs in the game: Paladin, Warrior, Dark Knight and Gunbreaker.

To play a tank you must first acquire the respective class or job. The first 2 tanks you will be able to play as soon as you log into the game are Paladin and Warrior, but they will go by other names due to the class system in this game. Since you only acquire Jobs when you reach level 30 with a Class, you must first level up these tanks' respective classes, for a Paladin you will have to level a Gladiator, and for a Warrior you must level Marauder (Keep in mind you will NOT automatically be upgraded to the new job, you must first complete all the required class quests, these should show up right below your main story quests in the top left corner).

The other 2 tanks were introduced in expansions, and as such do not have a class counterpart. As long as you've bought and/or reached their respective expansion's story you can easily get them. Dark Knight was introduced in Heavensward, requiring level 50 to acquire and starting at level 30. Gunbreaker was introduced in Shadowbringers requiring level 70 and starting at level 60.

How do i play a tank?

All the tanks have different playstyles, and i'm not gonna cover all of them here since this is mostly a general tank guide. However it's important to know that the tanks share a few defensives cooldowns.

Mitigation

Rampart is a defensive cooldown that reduces all damage taken by 20% for 20 seconds (90 secs cooldown).

Reprisal reduces all nearby enemies' damage done by 10% for 10 seconds (60 secs cooldown).

Arm's Length reduces all attacker's attackspeed by 20% for 15 seconds (does not work on bosses) (120 secs cooldown). Note: Mostly used to prevent push-backs/pulls in raids/trials.

Each tank also has a cooldown that is exactly the same but with a different name:

Sentinel/Vengeance/Shadow Wall/Nebula is a defensive cooldown that reduces all damage taken by 30% for 15 seconds (120 secs cooldown). Note: (Warrior has the added effect of also damaging any enemy who hits him during this ability)

Each tank also has a "shield" they can put on the party to reduce the damage everyone takes, these are Divine Veil/Shake It Off/Dark Missionary/Heart of Light.

Each tank also has a unique "invulnerability" that prevents them from dying for a limited amount of time with a VERY large cooldown (Hallowed Ground/Holmgang/Living Dead/Superbolide).

And then most tanks have 2 additional unique defensive cooldowns, one with a shorter cooldown (15 to 25 secs) and another with a longer cooldown.

How to use Mitigation

Despite the large amount of cooldowns at your disposal there is a very easy rule i use to spend my cooldowns, but before that lets get a few terms out of the way.

• A Tankbuster is an attack a boss makes that usually one-shots you unless you reduce it's damage done, sometimes there are shared Tankbusters which require 2 tanks to be taking the hit together or there's also Tankswap Tankbusters which requires tanks to switch whoever the boss is targeting.
• A Raidwide is an attack that damages every party member in the instance.

The easy way to handle defensive cooldowns is this:

if you're going to take damage from a tankbuster use Rampart or one of Sentinel/Vengeance/Shadow Wall/Nebula + your job's short cooldown defensive, this should ensure you survive the tankbuster with generally around 50% health or more (depending on how many cooldowns other healers/tanks have used). This also fits nicely within 1 double-weaving window, you want to make sure you press your short cooldown chronologically close to the actual tankbuster hit since some tanks have additional mitigation on the first 4 seconds of the cooldown.

and for most fights that's your only REQUIREMENT to mitigate damage, everything else is mostly used to help healers mitigate damage (which is important since it helps healers deal damage to help with getting past enrages).

But only using these 3 cooldowns will still make everyone extremely mad at you. So besides this tankbuster rule you should pay attention to a few things:

• Use Reprisal liberally on tankbusters/raidwides, a 10% damage reduction is very good and you should strive to have this ability on cooldown for the majority of the fight. Pay attention since you cannot have 2 tanks use reprisal at the same time since one will override the other, try to coordinate this with the other tank if possible.
• Use your raidwide shield before a raidwide comes out (Paladins have to work around this since their shield doesn't activate immediately and you want to make use of the healing effect it provides as well, try to use it during heals before a raidwide if possible).
• Use your short cooldown on the tank that is taking a tankbuster if it's not going to hit you as well (use aurora as well if you're a Gunbreaker).
• Try to make use of your invulnerability if it allows you to skip mechanics or take a shared tankbuster/tankswap tankbuster alone and the healers are comfortable with it.

Besides all of this as you grow to learn fights you will notice you don't use some cooldowns for a long time and you can therefore feel free to use them to reduce auto-attack damage or raidwide damage, always being careful to have them up by the time the next tankbuster comes. You'll also sometimes notice your Rampart or other cooldowns could be used a bit earlier or later to reduce the damage of auto-attacks or raidwides, these optimizations are something that you shouldn't be too worried about but definitely help the healers with their job.

One last little tip: I use Rampart and Reprisal in my first 5 gcds in a fight and it almost always lines up with a tankbuster and raidwide, if it doesn't align with a tankbuster it's unlikely you'll need both rampart and sentinel within the next 90 seconds anyways 😉

 

And that's it! I wanted to make this guide more fleshed out but I'll leave it at this . Thank you for reading this far and I hope you have a fun time playing a tank!